Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen

Cheaper by the Dozen for me, easily the most rabidly life-affirming, family oriented horror film I’ve come across this year, would have somehow occupied a place on my worst of the year list were it not for the fact that I sent it one week early to Ruthless Head Quarters. While other films on that list strained my patience to the wire, to cut long story short, made me drowsy and unnaturally restless for two hours, Cheaper by the Dozen had me red with fury. So red and furious that I have decided to “go under the knife” tomorrow so that The Empress will have cataracts and no more chances of natural reproduction will remain in this universe.

A staggering pathological right-wing tendency rather exhaustive and sneer-worthy, this is just the film to make all sensible people wish that large families, babies, teenagers and other productive Catholics be thrown in the ocean. I believed in due abortion and provision of contraception to everyone in my adult life. I am now ready to defend my position and practice it.

A violent revolution to implement that? Perhaps. However, even the sanest of the readers will eventually have to brace for nasty surprises and blood-soaked revenge in the not-too-distant future. I do owe this to Steve Martin and his colleagues the blasphemous creators of the most disgusting vanguard of a master position film.

To clarify, this film is uncomplicated in its story focus, attempting to tell the day to day existence of two well-intentioned parents (Steve Martin and Bonnie Hunt) who live with their twelve kids. That is enough as far as the movie is concerned to warrant a ban but the film manages to rise above its sickening premise by quite literally romanticizing disorder.

That’s true, we see children IV this family go berserk arguments and screaming, floors soaked with sick, food everywhere, chandeliers smashed, clothes being ruined but in the end, such people are the ones that the audience is supposed (or made to mentally as it appears you would be a jerk otherwise) to empathize with. They endure, teeter on the edge of sanity, even abandon their aspirations for the greater good of kin.

By “greater good” there is always s an unwritten sense that coach in his old school and mother on a book tour are quite secondary to daughter whose frog is dead, son who cannot wait to get back and meet that girl he left behind, and another son who just wants his homework done.

But that is the universe this film inhabits: if they go after their desires, adults are selfish and vain beasts, but if they shout and throw tantrums, children are an innocent and precious stroke. As such, there is a loss of proportionality losses. Earning and wanting to make more money and have adult conversations and take a bite out of life are all foolish and trivial interests that nothing can compare with a runny nose, tracking mud on the carpet and preparing breakfast for out of control brats.

‘There is also the issue of what I have called the “child-unfriendly” characters. The first people we and the Bakers meet after they move from rural Midtown to Chicago’s suburbs are pretentious humorless vegetables who, yes, take a deep breath, are vegetarians. It appears that the Beef Council is now performing the same role as The Catholic Legion of Decency, or the Hays Code from the 1930s. In addition, these vegetarians are letting the world suffer with only one child who is portrayed as an immodest, sad boy who cannot run out and play like ‘normal’ boys do.’

This poor boy has to take chess classes, learn to read, and write proper English. But to be fair, they are all the devil’s tools, as we know. At least his mom is really hot. The Baker kids, however, seem to have gotten a hold of their parents and do whatever they like. Clearly, they haven’t been beaten into submission, the Baker kids are actually allowed to be themselves, and have cleverly shown their parents that the moment they out themselves, everything associated with grown up world is dirty, quite literally.

Their neighbors are relatively well and quietly kept but such an atmosphere resembles a more of a worn out and uncared for museum than an ideal state of heaven. It is better, I guess, to be occupied and have no time to pamper oneself but to look forward to the fact that once a family is formed, it is the second best thing to ‘seeing God’.

No less unreasonable are other unrealistic features. Baker’s mother’s story about her family gets published and instantly goes on to become a bestseller. Almost instantaneously, she is off to New York to promote the book on television. Naturally she feels guilty because although the whole book promotion will last two week only, the family that she abandoned falls apart and is on the brink of destruction.

This creates problems for the father who is new in his work and is already stressed with the sorts of stuff that homes offer. It’s not a surprise that he is in the predicament where he has to choose between his family and the best job he ever had with the outcome being a mystery to only those suffering from higher evolution.

But why does there have to be a choice? It seems as if the mother gets on her feet and attempts to earn her own money so that she can pursue her dreams, but guilt engulfs her instead. The message is clear. Women ought to reproduce and be homemakers. Professional careers are the dominion of women-haters, lesbians, and Communists who feast upon their children.

He never gives up work altogether even after resigning from something that used to fulfill him, although this new occupation does not compromise him as an active father. In the end, we have no idea what that job is, yet it does not make sense to worry because it has to be enough, even in this circumstance when the employment prospects seems to be bleak everywhere if only to provide comfortably for a family of fourteen.

Just fuck. How could anyone easily cope with bringing up twelve children it shouldn’t be classified as anything else apart from pure torture, perhaps only second to the sensation of having one’s skin mildly set on fire, however, it gets worse when the kids in question are all, without exception, little monsters. They’re aggressive, rude, brassy, narcissistic, and uncontrollable.

The kid never gets bored, is incapable of speaking anything other than screaming, and shows no desire to sit down with a book, do some mundane task or simply go to sleep. These are children that experience no difficulty getting attention from an illiterate society that looks up to video games for entertainment. But when we love them in spite of everything and the society brings herds its bloody children and asks us to love them?

What is this table-turning business? After having watched Cheaper by the Dozen, the story of Andrea Yates (the Texas cultist mother who drowned her children, for those of you unaware) actually seems credible. It’s as though I’m ready to murder someone else’s kids after watching a film, so just quite simply comprehend how horrible I should feel to witness such an existence. But mobilizing his troop isn’t so tough with the comic genius of Steve Martin.

And there is one more character, the eldest daughter’s boyfriend; he is played by Ashton Kutcher. He gets away with such disturbing behavior for one reason: he has no interest in having children. What’s more, his obsession with ‘organic’ anything makes him a true maverick! But there are so many ways to make the audience dislike Kutcher (his being there is quite enough), yet the movie expects us to swallow the idea that this guy’s most infuriating trait is his discomfort with families.

So, if you are the simple mother character in the film, who is just supposed to be a hot mess, and all her ambitions revolve around giving birth to as many kids as possible, then turn to Cheaper by the Dozen. This is the last picture I will watch in this theatre as I am no longer a member of the community of illegal immigrants, drug addicts, and cyclists who are not always polite. It was probably not the best way to wrap things up, however, having spent so many months at the cinema which formed the core of almost all the rubbish I reviewed for Ruthless, I am feeling emotional about the memories I was wrapped up in.

It is, therefore, appropriate that the last movie I watched in the Thornton Town Center was with Ashton Kutcher and Hilary Duff, ranked 1 and 10 respectively in the death list I made at the end of the year. It is also where I endured my very first Ruthless assignment, the butchery known as The Master of Disguise. It has indeed been a long journey; now my torment has to be experienced elsewhere, amidst the foul and filthy of Denver downtown. Let the proceedings start.

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